Abstract
Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory role. Once we carefully spell out what playing these roles includes, however, we find that any notion of grounding that isn’t irreflexive fails to play these roles when they are interpreted narrowly, and is redundant for playing them when they are interpreted more broadly. The upshot is that no useful notion of grounding can allow a fact to ground itself.
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Notes
Note that while Barnes (forthcoming) argues for the possibility of symmetric ontological dependence, she (rightly) takes pains to distinguish this relation from grounding. So, she should not be counted as a denier of the irreflexivity of grounding.
Cf. Rosen (2010), Audi (2012a, b), Raven (2012), and Skiles (ms). For a category-neutral notion of grounding, see Rodriguez-Pereyra (2005), Cameron (2008), Schaffer (2009) and Jenkins (2011). Bennett (2011, 2017) and J. Wilson (2014) defend a different view: ‘building’ (for Bennett) or ‘small-g grounding’ (for Wilson) function as placeholders for specific determinative relations.
This is true even of Fine (2010), who is otherwise a proponent of the connective view. On formulating the irreflexivity requirement for the connective ‘because’, see Schnieder (2010, 2015). In his more recent work Fine usually talks about the “non-circularity” of ground, which is very similar to irreflexivity.
Some might be puzzled about how the distinction I draw in Sect. 2 between grounding qua metaphysical explanation and grounding qua the relation underlying metaphysical explanation could be maintained on the connective view. See footnote 28 for details.
Dasgupta (2014a) argues that grounding is an irreducibly many-many relation. In what follows I will ignore this possibility, though I suspect that my main points would go through on this conception, too.
A similar definition is suggested by Fine (2012a), though he officially treats both full and partial grounding as primitives.
This formulation presupposes that grounding is a two-place relation, an assumption that at least one opponent of the irreflexivity of grounding, Jenkins (2011), questions. There are two reasons for this omission. First, while relevantly analogous formulations are available for more-than-two-place construals of grounding, adjudicating between the options would be a tedious detour. Second, so far as I can see the adicity of grounding plays little role in Jenkins’ rationale for self-grounding. The lion’s share of the work is done by the idea that ‘ground’-sentences don’t wear their logical structure on their sleeve and create contexts in which the terms standing for the putative grounding relata are not intersubstitutable salva veritate. I will discuss a proposal along these lines in Sect. 4.
Fine repeats the example with propositions and also with universal instead of existential quantification. I chose to focus on facts because I take grounding to be a relation between facts, and on existential rather than universal facts, because the latter introduce extra complications that are unrelated to the problem at hand.
Schnieder (2015) has recently taken a similar approach to the asymmetry of ‘because’: he argues that properly understood ‘because’ is always asymmetric (and so irreflexive) because its underlying “priority relations” (causation, grounding, etc.) are asymmetric. Schnieder’s approach is similar to mine insofar as he focuses on general methodological considerations rather than particular problem cases. In other regards, it is quite different: on the one hand, he is interested in causal as well as non-causal uses of ‘because’, but on the other hand, he accepts the asymmetry of priority relations as rock bottom. By contrast, I want to give independent reasons for thinking that grounding in the “underlying relation sense”, and not only in the “metaphysical explanation” sense (for more on this distinction, see below), is irreflexive.
In fact, for reasons spelled out in Kovacs (2016), I’m somewhat attracted to this negative conclusion.
Philosophers who argue that “constitution is identity”, for example Noonan (1993), can be understood as thinking that every material object constitutes itself. For broad (identity-permitting) notions of realization and ontological dependence, see Shoemaker (2007: 23) and Thomasson (1999: 26), respectively.
Note that being a broad notion doesn’t imply being a defined or stipulated notion. For largely technical reasons, Fine (2012a, b) accepts weak ground as a primitive and uses it to define strict ground. This is perfectly compatible with weak ground being an artificial extension of the narrow notion, just like (proper-or-improper) parthood can be accepted as a mereological primitive and nonetheless be seen as a broadening of the ordinary notion of (proper) parthood.
DeRosset (2013a) argues that Fine’s notion of weak ground is obscure, but he doesn’t make the same claim about broad notions of grounding in general.
I use the expressions ‘metaphysically prior to’ and ‘more fundamental than’ interchangeably. There are other (perfectly legitimate) notions of metaphysical priority; for instance, Schnieder (2010, 2015) uses the phrase ‘priority relation’ for explanatory relations (such as causation and grounding, where ‘grounding’ stands for the relation underlying metaphysical explanation). Note that some x can be metaphysically prior to some y in my sense without being so in Schnieder’s sense. For example, as Bennett (2017: Ch. 4) points out, a hydrogen molecule in Ithaca is more fundamental than some water in Phoenix, but the existence of the former doesn’t ground or explain the latter (in Bennett’s terminology: the former doesn’t “build” the latter).
In the introduction I said that the paper’s main arguments would go through even if we didn’t reify grounding but instead stuck to a connective view. In the present case this might seem less obvious, since the connective approach is often associated with the “grounding = metaphysical explanation view”. Schaffer (2016: 85–86), for example, has recently complained that this approach is only suitable for grounding qua metaphysical explanation but cannot capture grounding qua the relation that backs metaphysical explanation. I think Schaffer is mistaken about this; in fact, the connective versus relation debate is entirely orthogonal to the explanation versus relation-that-underlies-explanation distinction. For one, we could introduce two different connectives for grounding and metaphysical explanation, say ‘becauseg’ and ‘becausem’, and maintain that the former is transparent while the latter creates opaque contexts. There’s nothing incoherent about this approach to grounding qua the underlying relation; it’s similar to a view of causation suggested by the late Lewis’s (2004: 77) remark that causation by absence would make it difficult to treat causation as a relation. For another, commitment to a relation of metaphysical explanation is cheap in so far as we understand ‘relation’ in the abundant sense. (See Kovacs 2016: 10–11 for this second point, which should be credited to Louis deRosset.).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for consistently pushing me to be much clearer in the next few paragraphs.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this objection.
Interestingly, Tahko and Lowe (2015: §3) mention the requirement of non-circularity in defense of the “asymmetry” of explanation. I think they mean to defend only the antisymmetry of explanation, given that they only reject distinct states of affairs mutually explaining each other but explicitly allow for self-explanatory states of affairs. It is also not clear that Tahko and Lowe’s self-explanatory states of affairs are of the objectionable sort. Some of their other remarks indicate that by self-explanation they mean something similar to the dualist notions: an extension of explanation as ordinarily understood. This is further buttressed by their sympathy for the idea that „every object x trivially depends for its identity upon itself” (§4.2, their emphasis).
See, for instance, Salmon (1977/1997).
Schnieder (2015: 138–140) mentions a similar justification for the asymmetry of explanation, but quickly dismisses it on the basis that it presupposes a “speech acts first” approach to explanation. I don’t agree with Schnieder’s assessment here, as I think that some kind of explanation-understanding link is plausible on any reasonable theory of explanation, including realist views. Realism about explanation implies only that the notion of explanation isn’t interest-relative; it doesn’t imply that explanation bears no conceptual ties to psychological notions like understanding and informativeness. See Friedman (1974: 7–8).
See Achinstein (1983: Ch. 3) for a helpful discussion of explanation, understanding, and ‘why’-questions.
Evnine (2008: 73–82) argues that the mental state of believing a conjunction is identical to the mental state of believing its individual conjuncts. I’m not sure if this implies that conjunctions and their conjuncts taken together convey the same information in the same way. But if it did, and Evnine turned out to be correct in identifying the two kinds of mental states, I would deny that conjunctions are explained by their conjuncts.
Cf. also Guigon (2015: 360–361) on this point. What if f 1 is explained by a plurality of facts, f 1 …f n —doesn’t citing f 1 …f n convey information that citing only f 1 doesn’t? Perhaps so, but the informativeness constraint rules out f 1 …f n as the full explanation of f 1 regardless. On the usual way of understanding the relation between partial and full explanation, f 1 …f n can fully explain f 1 only if each of f 1 …f n partially explains f 1 ; but given the informativeness constraint, f 1 cannot partially explain f 1 . Relatedly, one might think that if f 1 …f n explain f 1 , then f 1 ’s ability to explain f 1 in conjunction with f 2 …f n is a new piece of information over and above that provided by just citing f 1 . This is true, but is of little help here: if f 1 is the explanans then it should explain f n itself rather than just facts about it; accordingly, by citing it we should be able to convey new information, not just by citing facts about it. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising these issues.).
Thanks for an anonymous referee for pressing this objection, and for helping me clarify my stance on how we should understand the informativeness constraint.
See Ruben (1990: 6–9) for this terminology.
In its more common and less controversial use, ‘identity explanation’ means an explanation in which the explanans is an identity fact. This is not what I mean, and it’s also not what Ruben has in mind. The idea isn’t that the explanans is an identity fact; rather, there is an explanation whose explanans and explanandum clauses pick out the very same fact.
Note that it’s possible to combine the idea that ‘explains’ is not referentially transparent with the view that grounding just is metaphysical explanation. But in that case, there will be no way to drive a wedge between self-explanation and self-grounding. See Rosen (2010) in connection with this: while Rosen doesn’t technically deny that ‘grounds’ is referentially transparent, he accepts an extremely fine-grained, conceptual theory of facts according to which a sample’s being water and the same sample’s being H2O are different facts. He does so precisely to avoid violations of irreflexivity.
It’s not clear how the thesis could be generalized to facts no term in the language names, but the problems I will raise for Revised Explanation are independent from that.
See Kim (1998: 84); cf. Armstrong (1978: Ch. 18). Don’t confuse micro-based properties with microphysical properties and relations. The properties of being an O-atom and being an H-atom, and the relation of being bound in such and such a way, are microphysical. So, the fact [An O-atom and two H-atoms are bound in such and such a way] is presumably a microphysical fact and is not identical to the macrophysical fact [S is water]. By contrast, having O-parts and H-parts bound up in such and such a way is a micro-based property, so the fact [S has as parts O-atoms and H-atom parts that are bound in such and such a way] has a good claim to be identified with [S is water].
I owe this example, and the complication it illuminates, to an anonymous referee.
A referee suggests that by the self-grounder’s lights, grounding (broadly understood) plays an important role in both putative explanations. After all, the fusion has to be identical to the statue for the conceptual guises to do their work. I agree; however, I think this identity plays a merely enabling role in the explanation. It’s a precondition of the guises’ doing their explanatory work, but it doesn’t follow that the identity relation itself enters the explanation in the way grounding does in the irreflexive cases.
I say “more traditional” because while Rosen (2010) also argues that reduction entails grounding, he understands reduction in terms of real definition. This notion is different from the one that has been widely discussed in the philosophy of mind and science literatures and which I also have in mind here.
Of course, there are many competing notions of reduction, and some might imply that the asymmetry between the reduced and the reduction base cannot be established just by the conceptual guises. However, this would only make things worse for the self-grounder: it would imply that the relation between the two isn’t symmetric. But then what we have is not a case of self-grounding, after all.
Dasgupta (2014a: 11) hints that he wouldn’t be hostile to large enough grounding loops, though he doesn’t outright endorse their possibility.
One may wonder if the possibility of causal loops should give us some reason to accept the possibility of grounding loops. A complete answer would require a thorough discussion of the grounding-causation analogy, a topic worthy of a paper in its own right; here, I have to confine myself to a few brief remarks. First, even if self-grounding is conceivable, it doesn’t follow that a non-irreflexive notion could play the grounding roles. I’m willing to say the same thing about causation: if a relation isn’t irreflexive, it cannot play the causation roles. Even many friends of causal loops admit that no event in a causal loop explains itself (cf. Lewis 1976: 148; Hanley 2004: 125; Meyer 2012: 260–261.) Second, the distinction between narrow and broad notions of grounding has no analogue in the causation literature. Since there is no such thing as a well-worked out “broad notion of causation”, revisionists about causation have more wiggle room in weakening the theoretical roles assigned to causation. Perhaps this shows that despite a shared explanatory component, grounding is significantly different from causation and is in certain regards more akin to metaphysical notions like parthood and constitution. Alternatively, it might just show that we have a more nuanced understanding of the formal features of grounding than of those of causation. Either way, a non-irreflexive conception of causation doesn’t face the same obstacles a similar view of grounding does.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments, criticisms and discussion, I’m grateful to Karen Bennett, Louis deRosset, Matti Eklund, Lina Jansson, Chad McIntosh, Sydney Penner, Eric Rowe, Ted Sider, Alex Skiles, anonymous referees, and audiences at the 45th Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy at Caltech, the 8th USC/UCLA Graduate Philosophy Conference, the Open Minds VIII at the University of Manchester, a department workshop at Cornell University, and a workshop on identity at the University of Zurich.
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Kovacs, D.M. What is Wrong with Self-Grounding?. Erkenn 83, 1157–1180 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9934-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9934-y